


The Fourth Horseman

by ishafel



Category: Highlander: The Series
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-03-11
Updated: 2011-03-11
Packaged: 2017-10-16 21:05:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/169341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishafel/pseuds/ishafel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An origins of the Horsemen story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fourth Horseman

It's a common misconception that Methos was an unwilling conscript to the Horsemen, that he was somehow less at fault in what they did-or at least in their formation-than his brothers. In fact it was Methos who chose them, who banded them together and who gave them a purpose, a name. They were killers already but it was Methos who made them a legend.

There is a point when you have spent a thousand years with a sword in your hand and you can put it down and walk away for a year, a decade, six centuries. Methos has done this a dozen times, and always he comes back to it. Death is not only a name; it is a part of who he is, of what he is. The sword, the Game, are only excuses for this, small civilizations time has imposed. They are excuses for the kill, because killing is what immortals were born for.

Use it enough and the sword becomes an extension of your arm, so that even when you do not have it to hand you feel its weight, its presence. Play it often enough and the Game becomes a way of life, and you spend your days hunting for challenges, or running from them. Death has no patience for the Game, and no need for a sword. Death is a weapon already. Methos is a weapon already.

Death is who he is, but it is not all he is. He can heal and he can love; his hands can wield a scalpel as well as a blade. He was a doctor when he met Kronos, in the middle of a plague from the east that destroyed half of Persia. He had been so glad, at first, to have someone to talk to, someone who could not die. He had practiced his cures, some radical and some fatal, on Kronos, and learned to be philosophical when they did not work. And afterward, when everyone around them was dead, and there was no more need for a doctor, he and Kronos had taken horses and clothing and wagons and priceless jewelry and rugs, and ridden west like the sun, calling themselves merchants.

They had sold the belongings of dead men and with them the disease, and they could have gone on that way forever if they had not begun to starve. They died a thousand times and Europe died around them, caught in the grip of a famine like nothing Methos had seen. They were rich men by then, but there was no food to buy. And in the middle of winter they met Caspian, and he was the fattest man they'd seen in years, fat because he ate the flesh of animals mortals would not touch, ate even human flesh. Methos was impressed by Caspian's ruthlessness as he had been by Kronos's courage, and so they took him with them when they went.

They rode down into Africa as mercenaries, because they had nothing left to sell, and began a war that embroiled the continent. They were good at killing, because they were immortals, the first killers. They met a man in the south who was their equal, and more: a giant of a man who could tame any beast ever born, who the tribes worshipped as a god. Kronos and Caspian were all for killing him; three of them, or even two, could have taken him. There was a measure of satisfaction in taking the head of a god.

Methos almost set them on him; by then they knew what it meant to be immortal and they were anxious to have such a quickening. But he watched the man work to calm a panicked horse, noted the queer gentleness of the big dangerous hands. Silas's calm was a pleasant counterpoint to Caspian's viciousness and Kronos's nervy brilliance. He was pleased as a child to come with them, though neither Caspian nor Kronos was pleased to have him.

They began as a raiding party, moving north and east with the summer, taking what they needed to survive. It was not very long before Methos knew what it was he had. They were no ordinary killers. They were Plague, Famine, and War. They were the end of the world, and they were his brothers, the only men he had met in two thousand years who could match him. They rode with the seasons, and at first they took what they wanted, and later they took what they could have, and everyone they rode against fell before them. And for a thousand years it was enough; Plague, War and Famine, and Death who bound them together.


End file.
